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BUT I THINK THAT THE APPROACH IS THE REASON WHY I'VE BEEN BLESSED TO BE SUCCESSFUL.

Shaq’s Personal Chef Visits Syracuse

By Amber Smith

Health & Fitness Editor

You may know that he stands 7 foot 1 and led the NBA in field-goal percentage last year.

But did you know that Shaq has a weakness for pound cake? Or that he enjoys a pre-game meal of 1 ½ serving of lasagna about four hours before the game? Or that the 325-pound Miami Heat center is dieting to shed 20 pounds?

Shaquille O’Neal has a personal chef to help him do it.

“He’s a very consistent type of eater. Not extremely picky, very basic. He’s not into all the fancy stuff,” says Chef Jerome Brown, who splits his time between Miami and his home in North Carolina, and who has based at Fort Drum during his time in the Army. Brown appears in Syracuse this weekend.

“He’s also very, very disciplined.” He says if Shaq. “We don’t run into a lot of problems with him gorging or doing a lot of cheating.”

Brown, 38, started cooking as a child. One morning when he was 7, he awoke before his mom.

“I was hungry. I didn’t want to wait. I went into the kitchen and began to make pancakes and made stacks of them. I started out being hungry, and then it got interesting, ‘look what I did.’ She came into the kitchen and she looked, and all she said was, ‘turn the flame down. You’ve got it too high.’”

Brown was a cook in the Army, and then served apprenticeships with several executive chefs. He was a chef at Walt Disney World, and for a sheik in Saudi Arabia, and his portfolio of people he’s served includes former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan and many basketball stars.

To help Shaq lose weight, Brown is “just monitoring his intake, feeding him a lot of lean meats, seafood, very little red meat, very little, and absolutely no pork. That’s from a health standpoint, rather than a religious standpoint.”

Shaq’s not a big vegetable eater. And he used to abstain from eating seafood, Brown says.

“It’s funny, because before I prepared tilapia for him, he wouldn’t eat a lot of fish. I sautéed some tilapia for him said, ‘try this.’ He loves it. So three or four times a week, he’ll have tilapia. He prefers buttermilk ranch dressing to dip it in, versus the typical tartar sauce or cocktail sauce.”

Brown became Shaq’s chef eight months ago, thanks to a reputation he’s cultivated as the person to call when you need to get your weight in order. He says he helped gospel artist Bryon Cage lose 30 pounds by teaching him how to eat on the go. And, he says he helped basketball player Isaac “Ike” Austin slim down to and maintain a weight for 260 for three years, so he could compete in the NBA.

It’s basic nutrition that Brown preaches.

“But I think that the approach is the reason why I’ve been blessed to be successful. I’m very nonjudgmental. I’m very careful not to get into an ‘I told you so’ position. When they want to do it their way, and say, ‘you’re going to put back on some weight doing what you’re doing,’ I stand back.”

If a client comes back to him, frustrated at adding weight, Brown’s usual response is: “‘you know what? Don’t worry about it. It was just a lesson learned.’